Page:The Other Life.djvu/130

 by ways we know not, from the cold and darkness of our sensual life to the light and warmth, the beauty and peace of the celestial country.

There is a great difference between spiritual thought and natural thought. Spiritual thought is not merely thinking about spiritual things, but thinking about all things in a spiritual manner.

If the angels thought about their external world as we do of ours; if there were fixed times and spaces there as here; if they studied the objects around them in our sensuous manner, and viewed them as something independent of their own spiritual states; then indeed the heaven of Swedenborg would be little better than a physical globe purified and etherealized; such a heaven as the current theology expects when the dead bodies are raised and made incorruptible, and the earth is prepared by fire for the final habitation of the saints!

But the angels do not survey their surrounding phenomena as we do ours. They do not think of the objects about them as something separate from them and independent of them; as something to be studied by observation and experiment and induction, the processes by which our natural sciences are constructed on the evidence of our senses. That would be to think naturally as we do, and